Joan Judge is Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008, awarded Honourable Mention, Wallace K. Ferguson Prize), Print and Politics: 'Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (1996), and co-editor of Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History (2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project with the working title 'Quotidian Concerns: Everyday Knowledge and the Rise of the Common Reader in China, 1870-1949'.

Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She is Director of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. She holds an M.A. from the University of Oxford (1990). Her Ph.D. (1994) and her habilitation (1998) are both from Heidelberg. In 2000 she received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Prize. In 2013, her book-length study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution won the Fairbank Prize by the American Historical Association. Her research focuses on cultural production in (greater) China covering a wide range of topics from music to (visual) and (historical) print media in China's long modernity.